Flee, Spree, Three (Codename: Chandler Trilogy - Three Complete Novels)

by J. A. Konrath

“You forgot last night already?” she asked, winking.

  I averted my eyes so I didn’t have to witness the rest of the exchange.

  When the flirting was finally over, Fleming promised to contact us when she was in position, and we were on our way.

  Tequila drove to the end of Halweg Road, where he’d dropped me off yesterday. Rather than risk another tow, he pulled into the woods, down a shallow ditch, and parked behind a copse of dog-wood trees so his truck wouldn’t be immediately visible.

  “So, you seem to have hit it off with my sister pretty well,” I said to Tequila as we trekked into the woods.

  He grunted, noncommittal.

  “She seems to like you, too.”

  Another grunt. I grunted back, to see how he’d respond. He didn’t reply at all.

  Fascinating company, as always.

  We stayed inside the tree line, hiking in silence, and after heading west about two kilometers we passed the reservoir where I’d dropped my bag.

  “Your money is at the bottom, if you want to dive in,” I said.

  No reply.

  “It’s full of cool salamanders,” I told him.

  Tequila remained silent. I’d had better conversations with walls.

  The prison was five hundred meters southwest, but neither of us knew where the front entrance was, or what we’d be facing. While waiting for Fleming to call, I used the binocs to do a slow sweep of the area. The whole compound seemed to be deserted. There weren’t even any construction workers. I wasn’t sure if that was a good thing or a cause for concern. It was doubtful they knew we were coming back, especially this soon. But the Instructor might have talked, in which case there would be a reception for us.

  I checked the time on my TracFone, then glanced at Tequila. He was sitting, crossed-legged, on a patch of wild grass, his expression blank.

  I was too tense to sit here with him Zenning out and not saying a word. No one had that much inner peace, especially me. “Jailhouse Rock,” I said.

  His eyes met mine.

  “You told me you’d teach me.”

  “Now?”

  Wow. So my sister hadn’t humped all the talk out of him, not that he’d had much to begin with. “We’ve got some time. I’ve never heard of JHR before. Where is it from?”

  Tequila rolled easily to his feet. “It’s also known as Fifty-Two Hand Blocks and Brick City Rock. It’s the only indigenous American martial art.”

  “Who invented it?”

  “Black guys in jail. It’s a system used for fighting in closed, confined areas. Lots of blocks, lots of feints and dodges. I like it when I’m toe-to-toe with an opponent, because it confuses them.”

  No shit.

  “Where did you learn it?”

  Tequila didn’t answer. I wondered if he’d gone to prison, realized his past was none of my business, and moved on. “Show me.”

  He beckoned me closer. “This move is called skull and crossbones. Throw a jab.”

  I planted my feet in a boxing stance, then threw a quick punch at Tequila’s face. He twisted sideways and caught my hand between his right palm and left elbow, deflecting the power and direction of my punch while also positioning himself on my unguarded right side. It was the same move Rochester had done to me at the hospital.

  “Again,” Tequila said. “Slow.”

  I threw the same punch, slower, and watched how he moved.

  “Again.”

  We repeated it three more times at reduced speed, and then he said. “For real now.”

  I threw a right punch, fast as I could, and he blocked, used his palm to hold my wrist, then moved the elbow along my body and gave me a firm tap in the cheek, showing how easily he’d gotten inside my defenses.

  We drilled it three more times, then I changed things up and tried a left jab. He countered just as easily, but on the follow-through he dropped to one knee and gave me a short uppercut in the ribs, pulling it so he didn’t hurt me.

  “Now you.”

  The first few times, I was having trouble finding the right place for my elbow, but after a dozen attempts I was getting the hang of it.

  “For real,” I said.

  Tequila hit, hard and fast, and I used skull and crossbones to deflect the punch, then lightly caught him in the temple with my elbow.

  “You learn quick,” he said, rubbing his head.

  “Show me more.”

  “Catch and kiss. Punch me.”

  Once again I threw the jab and he caught the fist between his forearms, then kissed my knuckles.

  I laughed. “That’s 52 Blocks? But that’s so sweet.”

  Still holding his lips to my hand, Tequila bent my own arm at the elbow, and keeping it locked within his arms, pushed back, making me smack myself in the nose. I fell onto my ass.

  As I blinked away starry motes, Tequila helped me up.

  “Jailhouse Rock uses distraction. For every move thrown, there are handfuls of feints and shuffles. When the body is in constant motion, the opponent doesn’t know where the attack is coming from, or how to hit back. And if you can confuse your opponent for even a second, that’s enough time to land a blow.”

  Tequila began to do a kata of sorts, but it seemed freestyle rather than practiced. He quickly touched his elbows, head, chest, and sides while weaving and bobbing, using both hands, in constant motion. It was a bit different from Rochester’s style. Tequila was a little tighter, a little faster, and Rochester’s was more rhythmic and flowing. But in each case it was very tough to land a hard blow, and I had no idea where the next attack would come from. It reminded me a bit of a street performer on Michigan Avenue who played spoons, clicking them together against various parts of his body, keeping it going until his limbs were a blur.

  I tried to follow Tequila’s pattern, but four or five moves in, I realized he had no pattern. It might as well have been dancing, if there were a dance in which you tried to kill your partner.

  And that’s how it finally clicked for me. Instead of copying Tequila, or Rochester, I took half a dozen repetitive motions and made them my own. I faced Tequila, bobbing left, touching my head, right, chest, down, crossing arms, left, touching elbows, finding my own speed, my own groove. Then, when I was presenting just as hard a target as Tequila was, I popped the jab.

  He blocked, skull and crossbones, and tried to catch and kiss, but I ducked, bobbed, and cut an elbow into his ribs. Tequila stepped away, stuck the jab, and I blocked with my palm and elbow, then continued the motion and tapped my elbow into his cheek.

  “Good,” he said, which was a strange thing for a man to say after I’d hit him twice.

  “What are some other moves?”

  He showed me how to knee skip—advancing on your opponent while bouncing from knee to knee, and a variation of the skull and crossbones, where the follow-up was a spinning backhand, which again knocked me onto my butt. I also learned how to pull an uppercut short to drive an elbow into the opponent’s sternum, then clip him under the chin.

  By now, both Tequila and I were sweating pretty good. I wondered why Fleming hadn’t called yet, and then thought, inappropriately, about her calling Tequila a piece of gym equipment and suggesting that I try him.

  As we sparred, I had no doubt Tequila was good in bed. He had flexibility, endless endurance, and might have been the strongest man I’d ever met. Also, trading punches with him was a strange, but very real, turn-on. Who needed overlong showers and rose-scented bath gel? Sometimes a girl didn’t want to be tenderly caressed, or erotically fed. Sometimes she just wanted to fuck.

  Tequila threw a combination, and I ducked under it with a knee skip. When I stood up I was in his arms, face-to-face.

  We stared at each other for a moment. I looked at his mouth, his lips, and inappropriately thought about Lund. Lund was dangerous. A serious distraction. He made me think and feel things that messed with my head.

  And the best way to get a man out of your head was to move on to another one.

  So I put
my hand behind Tequila’s neck, pressed my heaving chest to his, and kissed him.

  Fleming

  “If life gives you lemons,” the Instructor said, “toss those fuckers back in life’s face and demand better.”

  When Fleming left the Walmart parking lot, she’d felt confident they’d thought of everything. But now that she was sitting in a traffic jam in the south entrance to Devil’s Lake State Park, she realized there was one very important thing that they’d forgotten.

  Yesterday’s events had changed everything, and not just for the three of them.

  Fleming knew she was in trouble when she tried to turn near the orchard and found the road to the south side of the park blocked off, a police car and bright yellow sawhorses barring the way. Moving on to the next option, she’d circled the park and approached from the other side, intending to circle the lake from the east on South Shore Road.

  That had been ten minutes ago. Because of all the commotion yesterday, Devil’s Lake was on high security alert. Which Fleming had no time for.

  The school bus in front of her inched forward, spewing a cloud of exhaust in its wake. Fleming followed, controlling the gas and brake with the cane in one hand, manipulating the steering wheel with the other. Stopping and going while park rangers checked each car moving through was a giant pain in the ass, but the time it took was even worse. Chandler and Tequila had to be in place, and now that they knew Hammett was with the Instructor, they needed to proceed before there was nothing left of their mentor to rescue.

  The bus pulled past the checkpoint and continued on to the information center and parking lots lined with other buses, near the lake. Fleming pulled forward, glad to be breathing clean air again, and leaned an elbow out her window. She put on an engaging smile, full wattage.

  The park ranger who stepped to her window had silver hair, and although he looked like he was ripe to retire, there was a shrewdness about his eyes that told her that even if this wasn’t the guy Lund had tangled with, he would be equally tough to snow.

  But Lund had help. Unfortunately Fleming didn’t happen to have an ex who was police chief to vouch for her. She was on her own.

  “Beautiful day, isn’t it?” she said.

  “Ma’am, what is in the back of your truck?”

  Fleming stifled a groan. Apparently he believed in cutting right to the shit of things.

  She fitted her lips in a pout, channeling her inner Marilyn Monroe. “I don’t really know. That stuff belongs to my husband.”

  Ranger Rick pressed his lips into a skeptical line and walked back to the truck’s bed. When he finally sauntered back to the window, Fleming added a touch of cluelessness to her sexy pout. “Everything OK?”

  “Actually no. There’s no hunting in the park, ma’am.”

  “Hunting?”

  “The tree stand, the ladder…”

  Hell.

  “Like I said, that’s my husband’s stuff. I’m no hunter.” She produced a shiver. “Lucky for me, he never hits anything, though. I don’t know what I’d do if he wanted to hang a Bambi head on my wall.”

  Ranger Rick stared at her. He couldn’t have seen anything but the tree-stand equipment. The assault rifle was safely behind her feet, tucked under the seat. He’d have to order her out of the truck to discover that.

  Please don’t order me out of the truck.

  “Can you get out of the truck for a moment?”

  Shit.

  There wasn’t a chance Fleming was going to do that. She was going to have to bring out the secret weapon.

  Fleming thought about Milan, about the pain afterward, and worse, the loneliness. She summoned her experience at Malcolm’s hands, and the anguish of watching Chandler fall from the wire. And then…

  She cried.

  Big blubbering tears blurred her vision and splashed down her cheeks. “Please, I just want to sit in the park for a little while. It’s been a hell of a week. My husband is leaving me because he says it’s my fault that he can’t get it up, and my sister is calling me a selfish bitch even though you wouldn’t believe what she did, or maybe you would. It all started when…”

  The ranger couldn’t get Fleming through the line fast enough, and once she was driving around the curve of the lake, purple-rocked bluffs and majestic pines rising in all directions, she allowed herself a small smile.

  Years had passed since she’d been in the field, but she still had it.

  She found Burma Road with little problem. Although she’d been a little loopy with freedom and Demerol when she’d taken it on horseback not even a day ago, she could remember every detail of the land.

  Lund’s truck took the terrain easily, even plowing over a small downed tree with no problem, and soon she had reached the fence. Time for the challenging part.

  After she turned off the ignition, Fleming took a few minutes to listen to the sounds of the forest return to normal after her intrusion. Birds chirped, wind rustled in the trees, and a rodent burrowed somewhere nearby. Normal sounds. Nothing amiss. The scents were normal, too. Forest and moss, a faint note of wood fire, and the last wisps of truck exhaust as they cleared.

  Satisfied she was alone, Fleming heaved herself out of the truck’s cab and positioned the crutches under her arms, her hands supporting her body’s weight.

  She’d walked with crutches and leg braces before, and although most people probably thought it was freeing for her to walk at least to some degree like she used to, it had never felt that way to Fleming.

  It had been one thing to ride Tequila’s back as he ran up the stairs. That experience had felt like walking, like freedom, like the way she remembered it to be. The struggle of shifting each crutch and forcing her legs to follow wasn’t walking. It was a visceral reminder of all she’d lost. Shuffling, but not really walking. Moving, but not really getting anywhere. Like rubbing her face in her disability. She’d rather sit in a wheelchair and move around at will any day.

  Unfortunately, for this she couldn’t use a wheelchair.

  Fleming heaved herself over to the truck bed and pulled out the climbing stick they’d picked up at Walmart. A pole made of tubular steel with crossbars jutting out on both sides. When assembled, the fifteen-foot climbing stick was designed to be strapped to a tree, providing an instant ladder. It broke down into three five-foot sections, and the whole thing weighed under twenty pounds.

  The weight wasn’t a problem for Fleming, the bulk was. Not that she’d ever complain, and it gave her a private thrill that neither Tequila nor Chandler had objected to her climbing a tree when they’d discussed the plan earlier. Fleming had dreamed of returning to the field for years. Her little manipulation of the park ranger had scratched a part of that itch, but getting up in that tree and taking in the view through the scope of the AR-15 would be even more satisfying.

  Unless, of course, she fell and killed herself. Or worse, broke her legs in even more places.

  Leaving one of her crutches leaning against the truck’s rear quarter, Fleming lifted all three sections of the climbing stick out of the bed and tucked them under her arm, using them as her second crutch. She knew just the tree she wanted, a tall sugar maple that had already lost enough of its brilliant orange and golden leaves to give her a great view, yet still held enough to hide her presence from the ground.

  The path to the tree, however, was slow going. Shift the crutch forward, follow with that leg. Shift the pole next, and then that leg. Twice she slipped on moss-covered rock. Once she sank into soggy ground, losing her crutch, falling onto her face. But slowly, tortuously, Fleming reached the trunk and began the task of assembling her ladder.

  As painful as the walking had been, the ladder was easy. Fleming strapped the bottom section to the tree, then attached the next five-foot section. Leaving her crutch and the other piece on the ground, she used her hands and arms to climb up the rungs. Only when she reached the strap did Fleming force one braced leg over a rung to hold her in place while she strapped the second section in place.
The process for the third was more of the same, and soon she was fighting her way back to the truck on a single crutch to fetch her tree stand.

  The tree stand came in two pieces, a footrest and a seat, each of which secured around the tree trunk. They snapped together for easy carrying, and the combination weighed less than the climbing stick.

  Another thing they’d purchased was a camo jacket; that and the dark cargo pants Lund had bought Fleming earlier would combine to make her invisible among the trees. At the moment, however, it was just making her sweat. Unsure she could manage another trip back to the truck, she threw the straps of the assault rifle and her laptop case over her shoulders, the tree stand under, and grabbed her second crutch.

  By the time she’d reached the tree, her hair was soaked where it touched her neck, and she could feel the drips of perspiration running down her back and gathering under her chin. Fleming thrust her arm into a loop of the tree stand and pulled it over her right shoulder. The rifle and computer rested against her back, the straps riding across her chest.

  Fleming stared up at the tree. The vantage point she sought was about ten meters up. Thinking about the height made her throat close up.

  The wire, yesterday, had been higher than that. But she hadn’t been alone. Tequila and Chandler had been with her, and there was so much happening that Fleming never had the chance to be self-indulgent when it came to personal fears. But now, all by herself with only her thoughts to accompany her, Fleming began to relive the biggest tragedy of her life—the fall that ruined her legs.

  She recalled the moment, the details in high definition and 5.1 Dolby. Milan, after midnight. Clinging to the side of a five-story building, climbing down after a sanction, relying on a wire to support her weight. Halfway to the ground, the wire snapped, and Fleming fell more than twenty feet to the alley below. Shattered bones had broken through the skin of her legs in half a dozen places. Still conscious, feeling every bit of the pain, she had ditched her mission gear and crawled ten meters into the street, where she’d screamed until she was discovered.

  It was a nightmare she used to have daily. Lately, she’d escaped with just having it a few times a week.